The Circus Fire (3 page)

Even more than fires, train wrecks have plagued circuses over the years. The most famous wreck deserves mention here. It also occurred during wartime, in June 1918. At 4:00 in the morning, the crew of a train carrying the Hagen beck-Wallace Circus stopped near Ivanhoe, Indiana, to fix a hotbox. The engineer pulled most of the train onto a siding, but the last five cars, including four sleepers, were still sitting on the main line. Miles away, an empty troop train blew through stop signals, its driver asleep at the wheel from a dose of kidney pills. In the old wooden sleepers, the circus workers and performers slept in their cramped berths, kerosene lanterns burning dimly above the aisles.

The crew of the circus train heard a distant chuffing and turned from

their work to see the headlamp of the troop train bearing down on them. The driver had finally woken up, but it was too late for the brakes. The engine tore through the sleepers, driving them together, pitching them in a heap. The injured were trapped in the splintered wreckage, and as rescuers clambered in to help them, the pile of cars caught fire.

The crash site was between stations. The Gary and Hammond fire departments came as fast as they could, but the only water available at the scene was from a shallow marsh. Realizing the fire would not be put out, people climbed into the wreckage to pull out friends and loved ones. Some did; others died trying.

The Ivanhoe fire killed more than eighty-five circus folks, including animal trainer Millie Jewel, The Girl Without Fear; the number is purposely vague because many people were missing or burned beyond recognition. One Chicago paper wrote: "The two bodies recovered today were like several others which had been removed from the wreck, taken away in common water pails. They consisted only of burned bones from which every shred of flesh had been incinerated." In the end, fifty-six of the victims were buried in a large plot in Chicago's Woodlawn Cemetery, more than forty of them unidentified. Unknown Male No. 15, reads a typical grave marker. A stone elephant marks the plot, its trunk drooping, indicating sorrow.

By far the Ivanhoe wreck was the worst disaster in the history of the circus up to that time; the sheer number of people killed was staggering. Typically, other circuses pitched in and offered Hagen beck-Wallace equipment and assistance, and in the great tradition of show business, Hagen beck-Wallace accepted both and soldiered on. They missed just two stands.

Though Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey had not had a major fire on the lot for many years before Cleveland, the show was not immune to tragedy. The year before, while they were touring the south, eleven elephants had died suddenly, most of them during their Atlanta stand. Autopsies revealed the animals had consumed large amounts of arsenic. At first a member of the circus train crew was arrested on suspicion of poisoning, but the charges were dropped. Police picked up several other suspects—including a recently fired worker—then let them go as well.

Old hands remembered that in the early thirties several elephants had

fallen sick in Charlotte, North Carolina, from grazing near a chemical plant by the lot, and one of the last stands before Atlanta had been Charlotte. While many circus folk accepted this explanation, the connection was tenuous at best. The cause was never conclusively determined.

In a way, all of these tragedies could be said to fit the popular view of the circus as a dangerous and slapdash workplace, populated by shady transients and naturally prone to disaster. Our regular world, we figure, is much safer, being routine. And part of this attitude comes from our wonder at the daring, maybe even foolhardy risks we associate with circus acts like lion taming and wire walking. The danger involved is that much more exciting to us because we know it's real. Big cats can and do turn on their trainers; tightwire artists working without a net can and do fall to their deaths.

But these risks are painstakingly calculated by expert professionals, as are the rigid logistics behind the daily world of the circus. Likewise, both systems come from a long tradition, often propagated along family lines, and are practiced and perfected well before being taken out on the road.

Mostly though, the danger incurred by high-wire artists and animal trainers comes from trying to do a new bit, or trying to do more. In the case of these earlier top fires, it seems obvious that the danger was an old one, and never corrected. Schenectady, Sterling, Huntsville—all of these would be remembered after the Cleveland fire, and then again after Hartford.

All afternoon tractors dragged the charred bodies out, the hooked chains clanking, then pulling taut. John Ringling North strode the lot in a brown leather jacket and cinnamon jodhpurs, directing the cleanup crew. He'd already called the sail loft in Sarasota for another tent and told his aides to scour area zoos for replacements. To the press he conceded they would have to cancel the matinee but vowed they'd play that night. The show would go on.

Dr. Henderson and his assistants worked on the survivors. The city donated the basement of nearby Public Hall, and they laid out a makeshift sick bay for two elephants, three camels and a Grevy zebra—all badly burned and in shock. Walter McClain asked for a squirt of Foille on his face and went back to take care of his other charges.

It could have been worse, everyone said. Besides the elephants, no performing animals were hurt, only menagerie stock. The ring stock top with hundreds of horses was right beside the menagerie; at one point a smoking pole had fallen on it. City firemen too late to save the menagerie concentrated their efforts there.

There was no chance of saving the menagerie top itself. It was 320 by 120 feet, with six poles. People said it burned in three minutes; others said ten. Like the tents in the earlier fires, it was waterproofed with the traditional mixture of paraffin and white gasoline. The
Cleveland Plain Dealer
reported: "One reason the tent was destroyed so swiftly was that its waterproofing was highly inflammable." The fire melted and then pyrolized the wax coating—turned it into flammable gas the same way the body of a lighted candle feeds its own flame. In essence, the tent burned like a giant wick. The breeze only made things worse.

David "Deacon" Blanchfield, the show's superintendent of trucks and tractors, testified at the state fire marshal's inquiry after Hartford: "I saw the one in Cleveland burn. You see one minute [it's] on fire, the next, there's no top. It's impossible to save a circus tent. There's no way to do it, unless you was right there and put it out with your foot. You ain't got the least conception of how quick a big top goes. That's as true as I sit in this chair. I wouldn't say unless I know, because I see two tops burn; and how hot it gets under there. That fire in Cleveland, it was over in less than twenty minutes, and it burned the hide off four elephants, completely off."

Initially Cleveland authorities thought the cause might be a carelessly discarded cigarette—the usual suspect in hotel fires of the time. One of the workingmen first on the scene thought the blaze originated on the roof of the tent, possibly caused by a spark from a passing locomotive. Another hand told a reporter for the
Plain Dealer
that he'd noticed a drunken worker lying in a pile of straw near where the fire started, smoking a cigarette. A third said he'd seen some boys with matches outside of that end of the tent. A fourth was telling anyone who would listen that the origin was a short circuit in a generator that was being repaired. The local fire prevention bureau would only say there was an investigation under way. "We may never know what happened," John Ringling North told reporters.

A truck hauled the burned giraffe wagon off to the runs. A local rendering plant disposed of the carcasses.

That night's show went on as scheduled; there was even an open-air sidewalled menagerie. They played to a crowd of eleven thousand, three thousand more than opening night. The biggest hand went to the elephant ballet, and especially to those animals who showed marks of the fire through their tutus.

In the basement of Public Hall, Dr. Henderson swabbed more Foille on the survivors. He had little hope: as with any seriously burned patients, animals are likely to contract pneumonia. He worked through the evening but in the end they were too badly hurt—they'd inhaled flames. One-Eyed Trilby the elephant died around midnight, then Rose the Grevy zebra. A last elephant, Kas, didn't live till morning. That left the three camels, Pasha, Tilly and En Route. They hung on, kneeling silently in their straw, unable to eat or drink. Early the next morning Dr. Henderson called on a detective to end their suffering.

The final toll was four elephants, all thirteen camels, all nine zebras, five lions, two tigers, two giraffes, two gnus, two white fallow deer, two Ceylon donkeys, one axis deer, one puma, one chimpanzee, and one ostrich. Publicly, the circus insisted there wasn't a dime's worth of insurance on the lot of them. John Ringling North estimated the loss at a gaudy $200,000. In private the circus filed claims with their carrier for the animals and cage wagons at just under $36,000.

The night of August 5th, while the evening show was going on in Cleveland, Pennsylvania Railroad police at the Duquesne yards near Pittsburgh arrested a boy in his teens for illegally riding a freight. At first he refused to tell them his name. Railroad detectives found menagerie meal tickets in his pocket, and then at the Duquesne police station, he blurted out, "I know something about the circus fire."

The boy said he was sixteen and his name was Lemandris Ford—or Lemandria, or Lamadris (the papers couldn't agree). He'd quit school in Hazelwood the week before and signed on with the circus in Pittsburgh along with an older companion, Jess Johnson. The two had been let go Tuesday morning for not working fast enough.

Lemandris Ford then confessed to setting the fire, saying Johnson had convinced him to do it "to get even with the circus for firing us." According to Ford, Johnson lighted a cigarette for each of them, then held a knife to his ribs and threatened to stab him if he didn't throw his into a pile of hay where the animals were eating.

The fire itself Ford said little about. Later though, he admitted, "I felt pretty sorry when I saw all those dead animals lying around."

The circus timekeeper verified that Ford had been with them for those days, and Ford signed a confession. He had no previous police record.

Ford waived extradition, and circus police chief John Brice and two city detectives drove down to Pittsburgh to pick him up. By the next day the detectives were convinced Ford had nothing to do with the blaze. The boy was vague when questioned about the menagerie tent and the animals in it and was easily tripped into making contradictory statements. The man in the photo he identified as Jess Johnson was actually another criminal with a connection to the circus.

Police picked up Johnson anyway a few days later, but again the detectives thought him an unlikely suspect. By now Lemandris Ford had recanted his confession. The police publicly called his story a hoax and said the discrepancies in his statement made them suspect he was either seeking notoriety or else a victim of hallucinations. The boy alternately admitted and denied setting the fire right up to the time of his hearing.

Circus police chief John Brice had been with the show over thirty years. Though his hair was now a striking white, he still answered to the nickname Barnum Red. From his earliest days, he had a knack for spotting

undesirables on the lot. Now his gut told him the kid was making it up. Medical records showed Ford had suffered a fractured skull in a car crash the winter before. The court ordered a psychiatric examination. Based on its findings, they returned him to Pittsburgh with the recommendation that he be committed to a home for the feeble-minded.

The origin of the fire remained a mystery, officially undetermined. While there was no proof beyond his confused confession, many still believed that Lemandris Ford was responsible, John Ringling North among them. By this time,
Life
magazine had already run a heavily illustrated story that stated the allegations as if they were fact, calling the accused "the young arsonist Alamandris Ford."

Later, other tall tales would crop up about the fire, including stampedes of elephants roaring down the streets of Cleveland, their stakes banging parked cars; the impressive weaponry (riot guns) and number of shots required to put down the animals; and the heartrending behavior of one lioness trying in vain to save her cubs by lying on top of them. As with Lemandris Ford's story, some people believed these and some didn't.

The circus had more practical matters to think of. They needed to restock their menagerie, and they did, partially, at least for the rest of the season. In '43 they would tour without a menagerie, and never again would they have the number of zebras and camels they had before Cleveland.

But the circus and John Ringling North would always find a way to profit, even from their own tragedies. Legend has it that the four elephants who died would later be displayed as sideshow attractions, much as Barnum showed Jumbo's remains in a special tent—untrue, it appears, yet testament to the public's perception of North's vaunted ability to find a silver lining.